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A Death Divided, by Clare Francis

Back to a good old fashioned mystery story this week, though the writer, Clare Francis has had anything but a normal preparation for a mystery writing career. (Admittedly, there probably isn’t any ideal preparation for writing mysteries – it’s just that this particular preparation does seem particularly unusual. But I guess her namesake, Dick Francis, was a jockey …) She trained as a ballet dancer and became a household name – at the time – as a long distance single-handed yachtswoman. She wrote several books about her experiences, Come Hell or High Water (1977), an account of a solo voyage across the Atlantic, being my first introduction to her work. Since then she has written four thrillers and eight very readable mystery stories, of which this is the sixth (2001).

Most of Francis’s mystery stories fit the classic mystery pattern where an ordinary person undertakes a search – a quest – for someone or something from their past. A Death Divided is no exception. Joe McGrath is asked by close family friends, the Laskeys, to search for their daughter, Jenna, who hasn’t been heard of for four years. Jenna and Joe had been best friends growing up, and it was Joe who introduced her to his unconventional friend Jamie Chetwood. Joe was devastated when she married Chetwood, and he soon lost touch with them. Now both are nowhere to be found, and quite apart from her parents’ distress at losing her, Jenna’s signature is needed on an important document. What can Joe do to find her? The story moves back and forward in time, as Joe remembers incidents he shared with Jenna, his meeting with Chetwood, and the few times he saw them after their marriage. As in most quests, he experiences both help and hindrance, and his search doesn’t turn out as he had hoped. Seasoned mystery readers will probably pick up the clues that lead to the classic twist which resolves the story, but as a plot it works quite well.

While the story is clearly plot driven, Francis, as always, writes well enough to make the book interesting for its characters and setting. Joe is a lawyer struggling for job satisfaction in a large legal firm. After the death of Joe’s mother, his ageing father has become obsessed with medical negligence cases. Jenna’s parents, Dr Laskey and his wife Helena, who gave Joe most of the love and warmth he experienced after his mother’s death, were originally Polish refugees who still don’t always quite fit into English life. The weather is bleak, Joe’s father’s house is cold and neglected, the unnamed midlands town Joe comes from is shabby and run down, there is little light or colour anywhere. None of these details matters to the story, but they give it a depth and interest, and a sense of impending hopelessness and gloom which goes well with the action.

My main criticism is that the character of Jenna, which is important to the story, doesn’t seem consistently developed. Except for the times that Joe recalls being with her, she is nearly always off-stage, and what she is thinking and feeling is reported by others. She is a function of the story, rather than a real presence. The same could also be said of Sarah, Joe’s current girlfriend, but I think Francis has been much more successful in her portrayal partly because Sarah is present and revealed through conversation, which is one of Francis’s strengths.

This, like all of Francis’s mystery stories, is definitely unchallenging holiday reading. But that’s what I feel like sometimes. There’s no sex and little physical violence, which can be a refreshing change in crime stories, though of course there is psychological violence. If you compare Francis with the master of psychological thrillers Barbara Vine, she would probably come into second place, but after all, that’s setting the bar quite high. You can read more about Clare Francis and her books here. She hasn’t written a new one since 2008, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for one in the future.